Website Marketing

Directory Submission Is My Least Favorite Thing

One thing I’ve learned over the last few months is that I really hate submitting sites to directories. It isn’t hard to do so I don’t know why I don’t like it. The stupid thing is that I have a text document with all the submission information, including several keywords I want to target, already created for most of our niche sites. Once I find a directory, it’s just a boring and mundane task of cut-and-paste basically to add the link. The part I hate is going through the huge lists of potential directories, visiting them, finding out which ones are really free versus paid, and figuring out which category to use.

This is something dumb that set us back quite a bit in earnings because I haven’t done it. I know it’s totally worth it too. Here’s a true story. I’m not an SEO expert, in fact I listen to SEO 101 every week, but we have a site where I did all of the easy on-page SEO stuff you’re supposed to do like the title tags, meta tags, etc. That’s enough I thought. Nope. The search engines hated it. It just sat there for months. Until I started building backlinks that is. The day after being accepted into a directory it started getting traffic from MSN for the keywords I targeted. No joke. These aren’t super competitive keywords but that was a really lazy thing to do on my part.

This seems like the perfect thing to outsource. Now, I know my time is better spent doing other things, but I can’t bring myself to pay someone else to do it. At least not yet. I am seriously considering testing this directory submission service after reading this thread on experiences with ranking in the search engines over at the Working Nomad forums.

47